by Davey Heller 16th February 2025

The following short review was first published on the Red Ant Australia website as part of a collection of reviews written by collective members to celebrate the 2025 Red Books Day.

The events that took place within Russia in 1917 changed our world. However, occurring well before the age of live streaming, very little footage or even photos emerged to capture the dramatic key moments of the revolution. This is why Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed is such an important book. Reed, a U.S. Communist and journalist, gives at times a visceral eyewitness retelling of the days before and after the insurrection in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) as the working class under the leadership of the Bolsheviks seized power.

Reed captures two of the most important elements of the Russian Revolution: its vast mass character and the vital role played by the Bolsheviks in leading this movement to victory over the immense class forces arrayed against it.

The mass character is clear from the descriptions of halls, filled with the sweat and cigarette smoke of ordinary workers, soldiers and peasants, listening to all-night speeches from the various factions. Factory workers gather together in their thousands to hear political speeches. These meetings, in their raw energy, have more in common with a rock concert than the staid atmosphere of many contemporary political meetings! Reed describes the furrowed brows of ordinary people well aware they were making life and death decisions. When the time comes for defence of the capital from the forces of counter-revolution, the Red Guards merge with thousands of untrained workers and civilians to build barricades and fight hand in hand to repel Kerensky’s Cossack forces. Reed consistently uses metaphors of the natural elements to describe the masses working together.

But Reed shows these elemental class forces being guided by the leadership of the Bolshevik Party every step of the way. Reed had access to the Smolny Institute where the Bolsheviks directed both the timing and planning of the insurrection. He witnessed their leaders making key interventions at the All Russian Congress of Soviets. These include Trotsky greeting the quitting of the Mensheviks from the Congress with the famous line “let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!” He describes Lenin being greeted by thunderous applause at the Congress as he took to the stage to outline the decree giving land to the peasants. Such bold moments where the new Bolshevik Government announce in quick succession decrees on land and peace give life to Rosa Luxembourg’s declaration that “Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hütten, ‘I have dared!’”

Reed published his book in 1919, only two years after the events he describes. Reading the book from the perspective of the present adds a degree of pathos. One is aware of both the subsequent awesome achievements of the USSR but also of its tragic demise. However, the flame of revolution lit in 1917 burns brightly in both the existing Communist states including China and in the hearts of all those fighting capitalism still. This is why Lenin’s endorsement of the book from 1922 still holds true – “With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly, do I recommend it to the workers of the world.”